Emotional Intelligence, Foundations and Frameworks Series

Emotional intelligence is one of the most useful ideas psychology has produced in the last forty years, and one of the most oversold. This book is built on the research rather than the sales pitch. Ten chapters take the subject from the ground up, beginning with a question that sounds simple and is not: what is an emotion, exactly? From there the book traces where the science came from, what happens in the brain and body when you react, and how the skill plays out in decisions, conflict, and close relationships. When a popular claim holds up, you see the evidence. When it holds up only halfway, you hear that too. The ten chapters cover: - Emotion, mood, feeling, and affect as genuinely different things, plus the argument between basic emotion theory and constructed emotion theory - Where the concept came from, from Thorndike’s social intelligence in the 1920s through the Salovey and Mayer model of 1990 and the dispute over what Goleman’s bestseller got right - Amygdala threat response, prefrontal control, interoception, and the cortisol cycle that once helped your ancestors outrun predators and now fires during a tense email - Emotional granularity, alexithymia, and why some people can name a feeling precisely while others manage only 'bad' - The somatic marker hypothesis and how feeling steers choices you believe you made on logic alone - Cognitive reappraisal against expressive suppression, and the real mental and physical cost of the strategy most people default to - Affective empathy, cognitive empathy, compassion, and why caregivers burn out - Attachment styles, Gottman’s four horsemen, repair attempts, emotional contagion in teams, and what builds trust at work - The MSCEIT, EQ-i 2.0, and TEIQue compared, whether any of them predict outcomes once IQ and personality are accounted for, and how the same skill looks in the hands of a con artist No background in psychology is needed. Every idea is explained in plain language and anchored to real cases and named researchers, from the accountant whose surgery severed thinking from feeling to the marriage lab that predicted divorce by watching couples argue. Designed for: - General readers curious about how their own minds work - Students in psychology, counseling, education, or business courses - Managers, teachers, nurses, and anyone whose work runs on reading other people - Coaches and trainers who want accurate material instead of quiz-based fluff Each chapter ends with discussion questions, and sample responses appear in the back along with a timeline of how understanding of emotion changed over the centuries, a glossary of terms, works cited, and further reading. What you get by the end isn’t a score or a personality label. It’s a clear view of the machinery that has been running our lives without instructions.